There are no beggars in Cuba. There are people disguised as beggars to seek easy money,” said Cuba's Minister of Labor and Social Security, Marta Elena Feitó Cabrera, on July 14 before the National Assembly. Her words, spoken from one of the highest platforms of power on the island, triggered a wave of outrage both inside and outside the country.
Since that moment, activists, intellectuals, and Cuban citizens have united in a campaign demanding the immediate removal of Feitó for what they describe as an "affront to the Cuban people". The petition is circulating through an open form accompanied by a letter addressed to the National Assembly of People's Power, where the minister is accused of denying extreme poverty and criminalizing the most vulnerable.
In his statement, Feitó declared that those who rummage through the scrap metals "are not beggars, but rather illegal operators in the raw material recovery service", suggesting that these individuals live this way by choice and not out of necessity. The reaction was immediate.
“A public humiliation launched from the podium of power against the most vulnerable: abandoned elderly, homeless people, mothers begging for their children”, the citizen letter states, which also denounces the complicit silence of the deputies, who neither interrupted nor responded to the controversial words of the official.
On social media, Cuban activists like Carolina Barrero spread images of people sleeping in doorways, streets, or in conditions of complete abandonment. “Let’s see if they finally ‘see’ the harm they are responsible for,” she wrote, directly addressing Feitó, Díaz-Canel, Marrero, and Raúl Castro.
On her part, the user Ileana Sánchez Hing, from Camagüey, also spoke out: “Minister, you must resign from your position. Don’t let them have to remove you”, she published in a letter in which she recalls that in Cuba a minimum pension is just 1,528 pesos after 45 years of work. “There have to be beggars, and we have little. Moreover, we have those of us who are not disguised like you call them”.
The public letter demanding the removal states that, while changing a minister does not resolve the structural problems of the country, it is a valid way of citizen resistance against the official dehumanization. "The people remember. The people demand", concludes the document, which calls on Cubans both inside and outside the island to add their signature.
In a Cuba battered by inflation, large-scale exodus, the collapse of basic services, and the abandonment of vast sectors of the population, the minister's statements not only hurt: they highlight the brutal disconnection between the official discourse and the reality of ordinary Cubans.
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